Direct Line from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion to Rep. Ilhan Omar

Feb 14, 2019 by Alex Grobman

By Alex Grobman, PhD, Senior Resident Scholar at the John C. Danforth Society

Rep. Ilhan Omar’s antisemitic statement that AIPAC buys the support of American politicians for Israel should not come as a surprise. It is nothing more than the now-Congresswoman’s latest attempt to resurrect the baseless accusations against Jews that were originally aired in the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Prior to the 2018 elections, her campaign boasted to the Muslim Girl blog that she supports BDS. She has labeled Israel an “apartheid nation.” In 2012, Omar tweeted: “Israel has hypnotized the world, may Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel.”

Her attacks have raised the issues of dual loyalty and conspiracy theories based on charges of Jewish control of the world made popular by the Protocols and support for a nefarious Israel lobby promoted by Professors John J Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt.

Despite the fact that the Protocols has been widely dismissed as a 19^th-century hoax, the potential danger it retains in shaping public opinion should not be underestimated. When Jews are portrayed as manipulators who seek power over other people’s lives, they can be perceived as dire threats. The Nazis recognized this phenomenon and exploited it, using the Protocols to rationalize the destruction of European Jewry.

It is particularly disconcerting that this false perception of the Jews is embraced by leaders of the Arab-Muslim world, where the Protocols continues to be ubiquitously available and is cited in the writings of mainstream academics, who lend credibility and legitimacy to this utter canard.

Israel and Arab Lobbies

As Omar undoubtedly knows, in 2003, the Protocols and its concomitant issue of Jews’ dual loyalty were injected into the American mainstream. In a book entitled The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, two prominent professors charged that a small group of Jewish officials working in the U.S. government were secretly responsible for engineering the invasion of Iraq.

Mearsheimer, a professor of political science and co-director of the Program on International Security Policy at the University of Chicago, and Walt, professor of international affairs at Harvard University, examined the Israel lobby and alleged it had “profound” influence on U.S. foreign policy.

They argued that the very significant level of American assistance to Israel, both financial and diplomatic, was unjustified on moral grounds and even strategic need. With absolutely no evidence of any connective tissue, they claimed that the “largely unconditional” aid was granted primarily because of the “political power of the Israeli lobby,” which they defined as “a loose coalition of individuals and groups that seek to influence American foreign policy in ways that will benefit Israel.”

They claimed that, beyond working to persuade the U.S. to support Israel “more or less unconditionally,” the groups and individuals in the lobby played key roles in shaping American foreign policy with regard to the Arab/Israeli conflict, “the ill-fated” invasion of Iraq, and the “ongoing confrontations” with Iran and Syria. These policies, the authors said, were not only contrary to American interests but “in fact harmful to Israel’s long-term interests as well.”

In a March 23, 2003 essay in the London Review of Books, Mearsheimer and Walt were careful to disavow any connection between their views and the Protocols. The biggest difference, they implied, was that the Israeli lobby is more adept: “[T]he Lobby’s activities are not a conspiracy of the sort depicted in tracts like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. For the most part, the individuals and groups that comprise it are only doing what other special interest groups do, but doing it very much better.”

Though Walt and Mearsheimer claim to uphold Israel’s right to exist, their biased assault on the Jewish state, including their insistence on holding Israel to a higher standard of conduct than any other country in the world, suggests they favor the country’s disappearance entirely.

Neo-Antisemitism

Like Omar, Israel’s enemies have embraced this view because it conveniently corresponds to their own conspiratorial fantasies about American Jews controlling U.S. foreign policy. Josef Joffe, publisher and editor of the German weekly Der Zeit, calls this “neo-antisemitism,” which he describes as a variant of antisemitism, one that may lack overt genocidal intent, but which contains historic themes of Jewish exploitation, manipulation, avarice, worship of false gods, and absolute wickedness.

The neo-antisemitism of people such as Mearsheimer, Walt, and Omar is the projection of old fantasies on new targets: Israel and America. In their view, the U.S. is an antisemitic fantasy come true, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in living color. “Isn’t it true,” they say, “that Jews, who owe their primary allegiance to Israel, control the banks, the Pentagon, universities, the media and the Congress?”

While classic antisemitism held World Jewry as the culprit, for the neo-antisemites, it’s Israel.

Accusing Individuals

Those who adopted Mearsheimer’s and Walt’s analysis accused Jewish officials working in senior Pentagon positions, such as Elliot Abrams, Douglas Feith, and Paul Wolfowitz, along with Jewish intellectuals and commentators outside the government, including William Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, and Robert Kagan, of subversively operating for the benefit of Israel by initiating the war in Iraq.

Former Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle was accused of conspiring with the Jewish cabal to dupe Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and President George W. Bush into attacking Iraq. By this criteria, anyone seeking to discredit the Bush Doctrine found it easy to “expose” the Iraq invasion for what Mearsheimer and Walt said it really was: a war initiated by the Jews and fought entirely for the benefit of Israel.

The absurd premise that seasoned politicians like Bush, Rice, Cheney, and Rumsfeld could be so easily deceived and manipulated into initiating a war in which the U.S. had no apparent interest was not on the radar of these neo-antisemites.

When Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice-chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, was asked on an African-American talk radio program about Jewish responsibility for the war, he offered a detailed refutation of the charge. Nothing he said persuaded the callers, until he turned the tables on them: “I see that the Secretary of State is Colin Powell and the national security adviser is Condoleezza Rice. It seems to me that it is more of a black conspiracy.”

The Arab Lobby

Many observers say it is the Arab lobby, sponsored by Saudi Arabia, which is quantifiably the most potent influence on American foreign policy. It represents the interests of Arab regimes that frequently undermine America’s security by supporting terrorism. The lobby works to infiltrate the American educational system, seeking to hide the aims and practices of radical Islam and distort a true understanding of the Middle East.

Political scientist Mitchell G. Bard notes that by working behind the scenes, the lobby ensures that Arab interests are given “disproportionate attention” by decision makers in order to influence American foreign policy and “manipulate” public opinion. Its deep pockets and long reach pose an actual danger to American democracy.

Significantly, Bard points out, the Arab lobby, as opposed to AIPAC, has no popular support.

“While the Israeli lobby has hundreds of thousands of grass-root members, and public opinion polls consistently reveal a huge gap between support for Israel and the Arab nations/Palestinians, the Arab lobby has almost no foot soldiers or public sympathy. Its most powerful elements tend to be bureaucrats who represent only their personal views or what they believe are their institutional interests, and foreign governments that care only about their national interests, not those of the United States. What they lack in human capital in terms of American advocates, they make up for with almost unlimited resources to try to buy what they usually cannot win on the merits of their arguments,” he says.

The Saudis who run the Arab lobby focus on a top-down style of lobbying rather than the bottom-up approach favored by AIPAC. As a proposal written for the Saudis once explained, “Saudi Arabia has a need to influence the few that influence the many, rather than the need to influence the many to whom the few must respond.”

From Congresswoman Omar’s remarks, one of the Arab Lobby’s efforts has been made crystal clear: the goal to weaken support for the longstanding friendship between America and Israel.